MilkySway

Introduction

This is a milky glass outdoor lamp that I transformed into a LED color lamp many years ago.

This was the first color LED lamp that I made with PWM controlled color fading patterns.

The lamp can be remotely controlled by a Philips RC5 infrared remote control that is used to switch the lamp on and off and to select one of 9 color patterns.

When the lamp is switched on with the remote control, it automatically selects pattern1, which is a slow color changing pattern.

The circuit is based on 2 microcontrollers.

A Microchip PIC12F508 to receive and process the IR remote control signals. The remote control command is passed to a second microcontroller, a PIC16F628, that controls the red, green and blue LEDs that

are assembled on a prototyping PCB. Of course all the functionality could be easily done with 1 microcontroller, but for the project I just connected together 2 individual projects that I had prepared.

I used big high efficiency red, green and blue LEDs from an old LED-spotlight. The LEDs had lenses to focus the light into a cone, but I have cut off the lens part of the LED because instead of focussing, I needed diffusing light.

To diffuse the light, I sanded the LED body with very fine sandpaper. This gives a nice diffusing effect, so you don't see the individual LED's shining through the milky glass of the lamp glass cover.

Pictures

Video